Less than a fifth of firms ready to take on cyber-risks

Less than a fifth (17 per cent) of businesses worldwide are confident they can get the better of any cyber-risks, a new survey shows.

The survey, conducted by IT auditing software provider Netwrix, polled 826 IT professionals from 40 different industries, worldwide.

According to the report, for 78 per cent of respondents, having visibility into IT infrastructure is absolutely essential to the security strategy. For 58 per cent of those polled, IT change controls or their absence are adequate to their business specifics.

The importance of visibility was also mentioned in another important highlight – the majority of respondents said they faced cyber risks last year because they didn’t have visibility into changes.

Sixty-seven per cent said they had security incidents, 53 per cent have suffered system downtime, and 45 per cent have had compliance issues.

Companies seem to be solving this problem by switching to automated IT auditing methods, which became a widely established practice as of lately. They mostly use third-party solutions, whose share rose from 29 per cent last year, to 39 per cent this year.

“The survey discovered an inconsistency between the initial assessment of maturity and the adequacy of IT change controls deployed by organizations and their actual ability to deal with cyber risks,” said Michael Fimin, CEO and co-founder of Netwrix.

“Ensuring security today can be a challenge even for experienced professionals. Due to this pressing need for stronger protection, more organizations establish IT auditing processes and automate related tasks to achieve deeper visibility into critical systems and data. Continuous control over the IT environment will enable organizations to stay on top of what is going on across the entire IT infrastructure and mitigate the impact of unwanted or unauthorized activity to timely address security issues before they inflict significant damage.”